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Of all the Catholic rituals of Holy Week—the Palm Sunday procession; the Mass of the Lord’s Supper, on Holy Thursday; the Way of the Cross, on Good Friday—surely the most striking is the washing of the feet. Partway through the Holy Thursday Mass, twelve people take seats near the altar and remove their shoes and socks. A priest, in flowing vestments, kneels, washes their feet with a cloth, and kisses them. All this echoes the Gospel episode in which Jesus, at the Last Supper, washes the feet of the disciples, saying, “If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet”—setting an example of leadership through humble service to others.

Pope Francis made the washing of the feet one of the most distinctive rituals of his pontificate. Throughout his papacy, on Holy Thursday, he would go to prisons in Rome and wash the feet of people incarcerated there. It left an indelible image of his own humility and of his determination to take his message to the outer margins of the Church. Francis died on Easter Monday last year. This year, the ritual was performed by his successor, Leo XIV, the first American Pope. Pope Leo didn’t go to a prison; he went to the Basilica of St. John Lateran, in Rome’s historic center, where he washed and kissed the feet of twelve priests, eleven of whom had been ordained last year by Leo himself, who, at the time, was Cardinal Robert Prevost, a Vatican official.

The contrast suggests the temperamental difference between the ebullient, freestyling Argentine Francis and his focussed, outwardly serene Chicago-born successor. Leo, who studied canon law, has spent much of his first eleven months in office assessing the Vatican internally, like a new chief executive getting to know a firm’s culture before initiating strategies for optimal performance. He has made some key appointments, notably of Ronald Hicks as the Archbishop of New York; met with various and sundry dignitaries and visitors; released his first major document (built on one of Francis’s), on the need to share in the suffering of others; and kept Francis’s commitment to visit Turkey, adding a side trip to Lebanon.

The new Pope’s reign had lacked outward drama, but the Trump Administration’s wars and threats of wars have placed Leo in a truly new and dramatic situation. The first American Pope is also a wartime Pope. Whereas Francis characterized the multiple wars at the end of his pontificate (notably Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s campaign in Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023) as “a Third World War in pieces,” the war in Iran has been a war of choice launched by an American President, in coördination with the Israeli Prime Minister. Donald Trump’s twelve-day war on Iran last summer, the January strike on Venezuela (and the capture of its President, Nicolás Maduro), and his threats to annex Greenland and to “take” Cuba have compounded the situation. No matter what Trump said about avoiding foreign wars on the campaign trail or during his first term, he has always been a loudmouthed American who appears to like nothing better than to pick a fight.

On Tuesday, the Pope publicly mentioned Trump by name for the first time. As Leo left Castel Gandolfo, the papal palace, CNN’s Vatican correspondent, Christopher Lamb, asked him if he had any message for the leaders of the United States and Israel. Leo replied, in English, “I’m told that President Trump recently stated that he would like to end the war. Hopefully, he’s looking for an off-ramp. Hopefully, he’s looking for a way to decrease the amount of violence, of bombing, which would be a significant contribution to removing the hatred that’s being created. And it’s increasing constantly in the Middle East and elsewhere.” He then addressed world leaders generally, saying, “Come back to the table, to dialogue.” The remarks were far from confrontational, but, as an instance of a Pope engaging directly with his home country’s President, they were significant.

Vatican convention holds that the Pope should be neutral in international conflicts and should speak opaquely, but Leo has firm grounds from which to address the U.S.’s present military actions. When he was the Bishop of Chiclayo, in northern Peru, he led Church efforts to welcome many thousands of Venezuelan refugees who came there after Hugo Chávez’s regime collapsed, in 2017. Leo’s ancestry includes four generations of Cubans on his mother’s side. And, during the conclave that elected him Pope, he deepened an acquaintance with Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, who is the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, the most prominent Catholic leader in the Middle East; the two men had been made cardinals on the same day in 2023.

Pizzaballa has been critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, as has Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, who decried Hamas’s “inhuman and indefensible” October 7th “massacre,” but also noted that Israel’s subsequent campaign against Hamas in Gaza “has brought about disastrous and inhuman consequences,” and that “it is unacceptable and unjustifiable to reduce human beings to mere ‘collateral damage.’ ” After the Israeli Embassy to the Holy See denounced Parolin’s statements as an unfair “moral equivalence,” Leo defended him, saying that the cardinal had “very clearly expressed the opinion of the Holy See.” Last Sunday—Palm Sunday—Israeli police, citing safety issues, stopped Pizzaballa from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Leo’s visit, in December, to Lebanon, which is home to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, dating back to the time of the apostles Peter and Paul, now looks adroitly timed. During a Mass on Beirut’s waterfront, the Pope spoke of the need for “small shoots” of hope in the “arid garden of this moment in history.” He also spoke of “disarming our hearts” and described Lebanon, where communities of Christians, Muslims, and Druze live alongside one another, as “a prophetic sign of justice and peace for the whole of the Levant.”

Earlier this week, I spoke with Father Daniel Corrou, an American priest living in Beirut, where he is the regional director of the Jesuit Refugee Service for the Middle East and North Africa, about the Pope’s visit. “He chose to come to Lebanon,” Corrou said, “and by doing so he signalled that the Church is looking at the Middle East through the lens of Lebanon—that it should be possible to live in a multireligious, multiethnic state governed by the rule of law, and that this is the goal the Church and the leaders in the region ought to be working toward.”

The worldly evidence is that the Pope’s words and presence had no direct effect. Hezbollah resumed firing rockets from Lebanon into Israel, and Israel has sent troops into Lebanon, urging residents of whole neighborhoods of Beirut to evacuate. “A million people turned out of their homes, with no end in sight,” Corrou told me. Since the start of the Iran war, Tehran has retaliated against Israel and ten other countries. Nevertheless, the Pope seems determined to continue calling for peace in strong, plain terms, as he has done since his first address as Pope, on May 8th last year. This Palm Sunday, at St. Peter’s, Leo said, “Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying, ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood.’ ” The quotation is from the Book of Isaiah, which is recognized as Scripture by Christians and Jews. It stood in pointed contrast to the Crusader-ish rhetoric of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, an evangelical Protestant, who, during a prayer service he convened at the Pentagon, four days earlier, had read out a prayer that he said had been shared with him by the commander of the U.S. strike against Venezuela. Looking skyward and addressing “Almighty God,” Hegseth recited, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation,” and then asked God to grant U.S. forces “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”

Those are fighting words, and, in the coming days, the Pope can counter them as much through symbolic acts as through words of peace. On Friday evening, the Way of the Cross was held at the Colosseum, which was spotlit and surrounded by a huge crowd. The Pope usually takes the role of Jesus, carrying a wooden cross, but, last year, Francis, who was gravely ill, sent an aide in his stead. This year, Leo carried the cross through the fourteen stations that mark Jesus’ suffering and death. The siting of the rites at the Colosseum—where it has been held since 1964, echoing a practice from the eighteenth century—means that the Pope enacts Jesus’ final hours not in a Baroque basilica but against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, which exercised power through violence. This year, as the first American Pope symbolically follows in Christ’s footsteps, the backdrop is also the war-torn present. ♦

It began with the simplest of questions: What would it be like to be him? Him, John F. Kennedy, Jr., our American Prince (or as close to one as we were going to get). What would it be like to be that handsome? That strong? Endowed not only with a privileged birthright but—unlike the actual princes over in England, who had weak chins and went bald young—the physical stature to match? What was it like to have Jackie O. for a mother? To summer on your stepfather’s private Greek island? To be wildly sexually successful without even having to try? In the world as I knew it then (meaning college), there were two basic conditions: that of being John F. Kennedy, Jr., and that of being everyone else.

This is all a way of saying, Yeah, I knew the guy. Not that well and not that long, but enough to have experienced the gravitational pull that he exerted, like some great big moon, causing tides of excitement and longing to flow around our campus every time he crossed the green.

Before he arrived, the image I had of John was the one everyone had. The film footage from his father’s funeral, in 1963, where Jackie Kennedy, in her black veil, bends down to whisper into three-year-old John’s ear, after which he steps manfully forward to salute his father’s casket. I was too young to remember the Kennedy assassination. John, a year behind me in school, was as well. And so that was another question. What was it like to be iconic? Historical? Engraved upon the nation’s memory but not your own? So that you watched that poor little saluting fatherless boy as if from afar, forgetting that he was you?

John F. Kennedy, Jr., salutes as the casket of his father is carried from St. Matthew’s Cathedral, in Washington, D.C., in 1963.Photograph from Bettmann / Getty

These questions swirled in our heads. And then, one warm September day in 1979, he appeared in living color to answer them. I was walking with my girlfriend when we saw him. Shirtless, in late-afternoon sunlight, J.F.K., Jr., was playing Frisbee, wearing nothing but black athletic shorts, tennis shoes, and droopy white socks. This was the Ivy League. Nobody worked out. (Nobody I knew, anyway.) And so I wasn’t prepared for the muscularity, the anachronistic virility, on display. John’s physique was so classically ideal he might’ve been throwing a discus instead of a Frisbee and been carved out of stone. You looked for the defect in him and you couldn’t find it. There had to be something wrong somewhere, but it would take a magnifying glass to detect. Most of his clan had inherited the freckled, rabbity Kennedy looks. John, lucky in everything, had received the enhancing admixture of dark, French Mediterranean, Bouvier blood. I mentioned it was 1979. Bisexuality was undergoing one of its periodic upticks. I’d fallen into some confusion on that score myself. But I had a girlfriend now. That wasn’t what was going on. The urge I felt wasn’t to possess. It wasn’t even to resemble. It was to draw near. To be allowed to draw near.

I might have spent the next few years watching John from a distance. But it turned out that he was an actor. So was I. In what ended up being our mutual senior year, we were cast in a production of Miguel Piñero’s “Short Eyes.” The play is set in a house of detention. John played an Irish inmate named Longshoe. I played Captain Allard, a prison guard who subjects him to a long interrogation.

I got to see him up close, every day at rehearsal. I got to act with him, the two of us alone onstage. He easily could have been a movie star. He had the looks, the talent, and the stage presence. When I asked about this once, he said, “Nah. My mother doesn’t want me to be an actor. She thinks it doesn’t have enough social benefit.” What, then, did he want to be instead? President? (I was too scared to ask that.) He had many political advantages. Charisma, good manners, a surprising lack of entitlement, and the ability to interact with everyone he met. He was interested in other people. Whenever I published something in our college literary magazine, John would ask me about it. He didn’t necessarily read it, but he made clear that he respected the endeavor. How he managed to appear so normal was a mystery. Or maybe not. Maybe the mere fact of having been born illustrious, with no apparent faults, with nothing to prove or to be ashamed of, had liberated John from the resentments the rest of us feel, and from the cunning and ambition such resentments fuel.

His curiosity extended to the universe. One night, at a house party, John and I ended up in the back yard, drinking beer. Suddenly he stood up and gazed at the night sky. “Hey,” he said, “you take a lot of reli-stu, right? Can I ask you something? Do you think there’s a God?”

I said I thought it was highly likely.

“My family’s Catholic,” John said. (And that was endearing, too. That he didn’t presume I knew that.) “It just seems to me that there has to be a God. Like, how did we get here? You know what I mean?”

There’s a long monologue in “Short Eyes,” where the character of Ice describes his masturbatory fantasies about the actress Jane Fonda. At its climax, he cries out again and again, “Janey baby! Oh, Janey baby!” The soliloquy was something of a showstopper at every performance. On the night Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis came to see our play, the actor playing Ice had an idea. We were crowded together in the dressing room, getting ready to go on, when he said, “Hey, John, your mom’s here tonight, right? I was thinking. You know my monologue, where I go ‘Janey! Janey!’ while I’m talking about jerking off? Maybe I could switch ‘Janey’ out for another name tonight.”

It took a moment to sink in. Then John began shaking his head. “No, no, no, no, no,” he said, to general amusement.

You couldn’t be around him without thinking about who he was. Even if you succeeded for a moment, you would soon get a reminder. I remember being at a loud party, with loud music, and sweaty bodies packed together on the dance floor. At some point, I began to sense, from the flutter of activity across the room, that John was present. (And that was another thing, the way people said, “John”—“I just saw John,” “Is John here?” “I was talking to John and . . .”—never specifying which “John” they meant and never needing to.) Turning my head, I saw John’s silhouette against the far wall. He was dancing, too, though it wasn’t easy for him. No one would let him alone. People kept coming up, girls especially, and he would lower his head so they could shout in his ear. (The same ear that Jackie Kennedy had whispered in, all those years ago.) As I watched, I realized the song that was playing was none other than “Sympathy for the Devil,” by the Rolling Stones. Uh, oh. Here it came. The famous lyric. Nothing could stop it now. I watched John as, from the stereo speakers, Mick Jagger’s voice, in the role of Lucifer, sang, “I shouted out / ‘Who killed the Kennedys’ / When after all / it was you and me.” Did John hear that? Did he hear it and block it out? Or had he stopped noticing things like that because they were everywhere? The lyric came and went, John showed no reaction, and we all danced on.

My most intimate encounter with John happened a few months after the run of “Short Eyes.” It was the middle of the night. I was making a postcoital trip to the bathroom in an off-campus apartment that wasn’t mine. As I inched along the hall, in boxer shorts, a door opened and John stepped out. He was also in boxers. It wasn’t his apartment, either. We faced each other in the darkness. And then, sizing up the situation, John grinned and said, “You dog!”

Me? A dog? And so designated not just by anyone but by a Kennedy.

Magnanimously, like Henry V, he had included me in his band of brothers. A little touch of John-John in the night.

He inspired fealty. You have to reach back for a feudal term like that to describe the effect he had on people, and especially men. On the morning of graduation, I was standing with John and a group of guys as we waited, in our caps and gowns, for the signal to start marching. Someone passed a joint. At that moment, from every direction, photographers appeared. They’d left John alone during his time at Brown for the most part. But they weren’t about to forgo getting a picture of him on graduation day. As they streamed toward him with cameras raised, John did something I’d never seen before. He looked embarrassed. He hung his big handsome head, defenseless against the approach of the paparazzi. All at once, as if by instinct, the rest of us clustered around him. Turning our backs to the photographers, we spread our gowns and tilted our mortarboards to shield our prince from view. I’d never felt anything like it. The sense of duty. Of fidelity. I might’ve been kneeling before John and calling out, “My liege!”

It worked. They didn’t get a picture of John until the joint was gone.

And that was pretty much it. We graduated and, after that, I ran into John only a handful of times. As the years passed, I kept up with him through the media. Pictures of John with different girlfriends (Christina Haag, Daryl Hannah), or riding his bike through the Manhattan streets, or on the cover of the New York Post when he failed the bar, under the headline “The Hunk Flunks.” I took special interest in the news, in 1998, that John had got his private pilot’s license. My father had been a pilot. Four years earlier, he’d crashed his single-engine airplane into woods outside Daytona Beach International Airport and hadn’t survived. That—and the fact that, when I’d applied for a life-insurance policy, the first question the adjuster had asked was, “Do you have a private pilot’s license?”­­—had made me acutely aware of the dangers of flying your own plane. Weirdly, too, John had earned his certification from the same place my father had, the FlightSafety Academy, in Vero Beach, Florida. The news dismayed me. But I think I understood it. Presumably, one reason John went around on a bike was the freedom and anonymity it provided. The same went with flying his own plane.

Everyone knows what happened. On Friday, July 16, 1999, at approximately 8:30 P.M., John took off in his Piper Saratoga airplane from Essex County Airport, in Fairfield, New Jersey. With him were his wife of three years, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and her sister Lauren. The plan was to drop Lauren off on Martha’s Vineyard before continuing on to Cape Cod, to attend John’s cousin’s wedding that weekend. They never arrived.

I’d moved to Berlin that June, and so it was from there that I heard the news of John’s death. Ever since my father’s crash, any report in the news about a small-plane accident would bring it all back. It was even more so with John. As I sat in my kitchen, listening to BBC radio, I was swamped by feelings of shock, grief, bewilderment, and regret that had barely diminished in the ensuing five years. As I’d once tried to piece together the mystery of my father’s accident, reading over the transcripts of his communications with air-traffic control and trying to figure out what had happened and what had gone wrong, I now scrutinized the details of John’s crash. There were almost too many mistakes to count. He’d been in a hurry to take off and hadn’t asked for a weather report. He was still hobbled from a paragliding accident he’d suffered six weeks earlier. When a flight instructor offered to fly along with him, John had declined. The plane itself was a problem. He’d only flown thirty-six hours in it, just ten of them at night, and three solo. Finally, John wasn’t certified to fly by instrument rules. It was hazy that night. If he’d kept to the coastline after he hit Rhode Island, he might’ve been able to orient himself by the lights along the shore. But, no doubt to save time, he’d headed directly for the island, over some thirty miles of open water.

You wait for the N.T.S.B. report, thinking it will be definitive, and the report comes back and says, “Pilot error.” Which explains everything and nothing. If you know the pilot, if he’s your father or your friend, you can’t be satisfied with a simple conclusion. In your imagination, you keep going up with him, flying in the front passenger seat and trying to see what exactly happened.

The question I’d started with—“What was it like to be him?”—was one I could never fully answer. But I knew a few things now. Despite his openness and surprising sensitivity, or maybe because of it, he had to hold himself in check. The world demanded a simplified portrait; John provided it, and, after a while, the two merged. His closest friends were jocks, big, athletic guys, not as inquisitive as he was, and not worthy of him, in my opinion. I was the one worthy of him, or so I secretly believed. That was why he’d come to me to talk about the existence of God. That was why he’d asked about (but didn’t read) the things I wrote for the college literary magazine. In John’s presence, I always hoped that he would bestow some mark of distinction on me that would elevate me above my station. Once, he gave me a number to the guard house in Hyannisport. He told me to call if I felt like coming out to visit that summer. From Michigan, I called the number again and again, leaving my name each time, but never heard back. Only later did I realize that John had to do things like that, give out his number, to seem normal and to not disappoint the many people who wanted to be his friend.

Looking back now, trying to fathom the person on whom we projected so many of our desires and expectations—and who continues to be fictionalized, as in the recent television series, which I haven’t watched—it seems obvious that the only way John could escape the pressure of everyone’s attention was to flee it. If you were J.F.K., Jr., what would make you feel free? Maybe only risk; paragliding, flying a plane, moments when you brought yourself to the edge of safety.

Or took you beyond the edge. It’s impossible to know what John was thinking in his last moments, as the lights of the coastline disappeared behind him and before him lay the blackness of the ocean, and the haze, the horizon line indistinguishable from the sky. The noise of the engines, the mounting anxiety of his wife and sister-in-law, who may have cried out as the plane nose-dived, could only have increased his own. What was John thinking before the surface of the water appeared before his windshield, rushing forward at terrifying speed? None of us were there that night to protect our one-time prince. And who could tell if his destiny was inevitable or of his own making? One risk too many in what had seemed the most fortunate of lives. ♦

When Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) enrolled at Black Mountain College, in 1948, ravenous to learn everything he could about art in general and about the art that he wanted to make, the photographer and curator Beaumont Newhall and his wife, Nancy, a photography critic, had recently been in residence there. Curators pop up in famous artists’ biographies all the time, usually as handmaidens to the creator’s genius, opening a door to a gallery here or supporting a grant application there. But the Newhalls were, by then, stars in their own right; in 1940, Beaumont had helped found the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography and had become its first curator, and, while he served in the military during the Second World War, Nancy had taken his place.

Looking at the photographs in the current show “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World” (curated by Sean Corcoran, at the Museum of the City of New York, through April 19th) made me want to know more about Rauschenberg’s education. Although there’s no evidence that he met the Newhalls during his time at Black Mountain, I trust Rauschenberg’s eye: he wasn’t the kind of person to miss anything. He would have been well aware of Newhall’s recent tenure and of his eminent place in the art world, a world he wanted to belong to, and I believe that he would have been interested enough by Newhall’s images to tuck them away in his mind for future reference or inspiration. What I suspect he would have liked in Newhall’s photographs—“Cape Cod” (1941), for instance, a shot of a sand dune with spiky growths piercing its surface, or “Souvenir of Chatham” (1941), an image of a depot and a truck near train tracks a few hours from New York City—is their stillness. Rauschenberg, throughout his career, regarded stillness as a form of energy; for someone as kinetic as he was, stillness was a non-native force, attractive though not always easy to achieve. Or attractive because it wasn’t easy.

A photograph that Rauschenberg took while at Black Mountain, “Untitled (Interior of an Old Carriage)” (1949), has a similar stillness and silence. It shows the seat of an open carriage, shot from the front, in black-and-white. The image is tightly cropped, the carriage wheels slightly cut off. The cab’s dark interior seems to lure Rauschenberg in, but perhaps he was also drawn to the small round window, like a porthole, above the seat, which looks out at the distance behind the carriage. The photograph feels funereal but rich, somehow—evocative of the days when Edith Wharton’s troubled characters tried to hide from others’ eyes, while the carriage horses clopped along, each step as heavy as destiny.

Rauschenberg and his partner, Susan Weil, whom he’d followed to Black Mountain, made their way to New York in 1949, marrying the following year and divorcing two years later. Although Rauschenberg took relatively “straight” photographs of places and people, including Weil and his first significant male lover, Cy Twombly, he also began bending the medium to suit his creations. While he and Weil were together, they collaborated on a series of cyanotype photograms. These transitional works don’t appear in Corcoran’s show, but I remember them the way you remember ghosts. Cyanotypes are life-size, created by exposing chemically treated light-sensitive paper to studio lamps. Whatever is placed on the paper as it is exposed—a body, a flower—is silhouetted. The vibrancy of the image is also the vibrancy of life, which answered Rauschenberg’s aesthetic question: How do you make the real realer? Which is to say, how do you make an artistic vision of the world resonate more than the world itself does?

Rauschenberg’s experiments with Weil opened him up, like an aperture. (Edward Steichen included one of the cyanotypes in his 1951 show “Abstraction in Photography” at MOMA.) In 1952, Rauschenberg started employing photographic imagery in drawings, something he achieved, Corcoran notes, “through a transfer process in which a printed image is shifted to a new ground with a rubbing technique”—a kind of primitive version of the silk-screening that soon became very important in his work.

Rauschenberg returned to Black Mountain for the summer of 1951. By then, the photographers Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan were teaching at the school, along with Hazel Larsen Archer, who had overlapped with Rauschenberg in 1949 and captured his love of movement and of grace in a photograph of her own. (Her picture shows Rauschenberg stripped to the waist, “doing” modern dance by striking a Martha Graham-like pose. It’s a wonderful picture of a moment, full of youth and freedom and the unself-conscious self-importance one has to have in order to make anything at all at that age.) Rauschenberg was presumably familiar with Siskind’s views on the inherently abstract nature of photography. Even if an image is shot straight on, Siskind argued, the camera often renders it “unrecognizable; for it has been removed from its usual context, disassociated from its customary neighbors and forced into new relationships.” Part of Rauschenberg’s genius was not to force the juxtapositions but to try out unexpected combinations—these trash bags with that diner sign, or the different angles from which New York can come at you, as in “New York City” (1981), which shows us the Twin Towers from the perspective of the Lower East Side. Before we focus in on the looming buildings, we see tenement fire escapes, a courthouse, a street lamp, traffic: all the things we live among but don’t necessarily look at.

His photographs of New York redirect our attention by taking the noise out of the city. The silence of the medium is the dominant aesthetic pleasure of “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York.” How moving it is to see, in “Staten Island Beach (I)” (ca. 1951), the torso of a man lying on a striped towel, his hands placed a little awkwardly on his swimming trunks. His head isn’t visible; the focus of the image is the swirl of hair on the man’s chest and at his waist, pointing toward what is concealed in his trunks. A mystery in the sunlight that’s reminiscent of Newhall’s quiet picture of a dune, and the queer vegetation growing out of that body of sand.

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The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump’s address on the Iran war and the playbook that has defined his career in business and politics when confronted with a crisis: escalate and blame others. The panel discusses how that same playbook is being applied to the Iran conflict with potentially disastrous results. “He’s immune to any possibility of accountability,” the staff writer Evan Osnos says. “That became not just one of the ways he tells his own story but actually how he imagines history will unfold in his hands.”

This week’s reading:

“Donald Trump’s Case for War Fails to Mention How to Win It,” by Susan B. Glasser

“The Team Behind a Pro-Iran, Lego-Themed Viral-Video Campaign,” by Kyle Chayka

“He Helped Stop Iran from Getting the Bomb,” by David D. Kirkpatrick

“How Pakistan Became a Major Player in Peace Negotiations Between the U.S. and Iran,” by Isaac Chotiner

“The Spectacle of War and the Struggle to Protest,” by Jay Caspian Kang

Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

In the fall, Democrats shut down the government for forty-three days—the longest such closure ever—prior to the emergence of a deal that funded most agencies through the end of January. As that new deadline approached, a longer-term settlement appeared to be coming together—but then federal immigration agents in Minnesota killed Alex Pretti, and Senate Democrats insisted that they would not funnel cash to the Department of Homeland Security without significant legal checks on its operations. This did lead to a second shutdown, although it lasted only a couple of days; Congress voted through a package that funded the bulk of the government, as planned, in addition to D.H.S., on a temporary basis, to allow two more weeks for negotiations. But those talks went nowhere, and on Valentine’s Day D.H.S. ran out of money. Ironically, this new, partial shutdown wouldn’t really curb immigration enforcement, which had received a durable cash injection from a spending bill last year. It did seem set to hamper uncontroversial agencies like the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration.

What followed was, as is often the case these days, a mix of the predictable, the strange, and the predictably strange. Talks about immigration-enforcement guardrails—such as barring agents from wearing masks, and putting an end to warrantless sweeps of private residences—did not reach a conclusion. Meanwhile, the white heat of attention on D.H.S. began to dissipate, not least after President Donald Trump went to war with Iran. In mid-March, one observer declared the shutdown “the quietest” in U.S. history; as of this past weekend, it was certainly the longest ever, exceeding the closure in the fall. By then, the noise about the shutdown had grown louder, as unpaid T.S.A. agents called in sick en masse, leading to huge lines at airports. Trump said that he would seek to pay T.S.A. salaries by executive fiat, inviting questions as to whether he could legally do that, and, if he could, why he didn’t do it earlier. Finally, late last week, Republicans and Democrats in the Senate agreed to a compromise—which Democrats had pushed for weeks—that would fund all of D.H.S. except for its immigration-enforcement arms. The G.O.P. alone would fund the latter through a separate budgetary process that isn’t susceptible to the filibuster, and therefore doesn’t require any Democratic support. The House of Representatives, however, torpedoed the agreement. Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly dismissed the Senate’s action as both a “crap sandwich” and a “joke.”

This teed up a further week of jockeying that was both no laughing matter and, at times, quite funny. Trump followed through on his T.S.A.-pay pledge, easing the airport chaos. Meanwhile, many members of Congress skipped town, amid growing public opprobrium that, perhaps, crystallized most visibly in the gossip rag TMZ, which has gone full Woodward and Bernstein, running photos of lawmakers in the line of anything but duty. (The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham was papped at Disney World holding a bubble wand.) On Wednesday, Johnson consented to the initial Senate plan after all; what had been a crap sandwich was now, apparently, a tasty process on “two parallel” slices of bread. The Senate dispensed with the legislation funding the non-immigration portions of D.H.S. on Thursday, but the House punted, and members from across the ideological spectrum of the Republican caucus are reputedly furious with Johnson for trying to force them to eat shit. It’s still unclear when—and how—the bill might pass. Trump, for his part, has said that he wants the other bill, the one funding immigration enforcement, on his desk by June 1st. Amid the continuing impasse, he also said that he would sign an order paying all unpaid D.H.S. staffers, not just those at the T.S.A.

Republicans, thanks to their recent intercameral sniping, have already succeeded in making the slow dénouement of the D.H.S. shutdown squarely about them, at least in the élite media. (TMZ’s coverage has had more of a “plague on both your houses” flavor.) Since it was the Democrats who initially forced the shutdown, however—and in light of the liberal psychodrama that has engulfed the Party’s use (or not) of such tactics, dating back more than a year now—it’s worth pausing to ask what they have gained from it. If Party bigwigs were accused of caving after the shutdown in the fall ended without concessions on the policy objectives they had sought—in that case, the extension of enhanced Obamacare subsidies—did they not also cave this time? Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, who was widely blamed for the health-care capitulation despite personally having voted against it, insisted the opposite. “Senate Democrats never wavered,” he said. “We were clear from the start: Fund critical security, protect Americans, and no blank check for reckless ICE and border patrol enforcement.” More surprisingly, this time, at least some liberal pundits and progressive groups broadly agreed.

Since January, there have been changes at D.H.S. Immigration officials announced a drawdown in Minnesota; there has also been turnover among top personnel, including Kristi Noem, the D.H.S. Secretary, who was fired—sorry, moved into the very real job of Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas—and replaced by Senator Markwayne Mullin, who, at his confirmation hearing, promised to tone things down. (Only in Trump’s Washington can a former M.M.A. fighter be considered the deëscalatory option.) But the shutdown didn’t really create the pressure that caused these developments—if anything, public blowback following the killings of Pretti and others led to these developments and to the shutdown. In Noem’s case, the straw that broke the camel’s—or should that be horse’s?—back seems to have been her commission of a cardinal Trumpworld sin: making herself the center of attention by starring in a high-budget, cowboy-coded P.R. flick. And, beyond rhetoric, it’s not clear that Trump’s deportation policy has meaningfully, lastingly changed.

Back in January, Democrats were not willing to accept changes to optics alone, instead demanding concrete legal reforms to rein in agents’ perceived brutality. The current provisional deal does not contain those demands. Sure, Republicans are already starting to resemble Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes as they try to pass the deal and legislate more funding unilaterally—they have a razor-thin majority in the House, where angry hard-liners hold great sway and any party-line bill could be hampered by the push and pull of certain members raising concerns about budgetary largesse and others trying to lard up on other priorities—and this will be good for Democrats politically. But, if or when Republicans pass a bill, it will ultimately be on their own terms. Schumer’s defiant remarks could come to resemble a different “Simpsons” meme, involving the hack lawyer Lionel Hutz repunctuating an ad for his services: “Senate Democrats never wavered? No! Blank check for reckless ICE and border-patrol enforcement!”

I predicted, in January, that if Democrats failed to secure significant concessions, with Republicans on the back foot, the backlash would be fierce. Apparently, I was wrong about that; prior critics of Schumer et al. seem mollified by the idea that Democrats showed fight, and kept their hands clean. In January, I also wrote that, as instruments of leverage for a minority party, shutdowns are not cost-free magic wands. (They might be more like bubble wands: diverting for a bit but risky to hold on to for too long.) Democrats must work within a disorienting universe in which policymakers sometimes seem bound by the normal rules of political gravity—Republicans did begin to back off Trump’s mass-deportation campaign after its tactics became unpopular—and other times just do whatever they want. In the fall, I argued that Democrats were unfairly thrashed for failing to secure health-care concessions that were not immediately attainable. This time, I felt that they might have had enough leverage to impose potentially life-saving accountability on D.H.S., even if a compromise that involved any funding at all for immigration enforcement would surely have been unpalatable to sections of the base. Democrats were not avoiding blame for the airport lines—like TMZ, voters appeared to be poxing both houses—but, in the zero-sum Beltway game, they didn’t seem to be losing in the court of public opinion; Republicans, if anything, were being blamed slightly more. Maybe a partial shutdown was never going to be enough. Maybe the gravity of the killings in Minnesota justified taking the whole government hostage all along.

Doing that might have forced a quicker resolution, by concentrating public attention. Democrats’ fall shutdown, I and others argued, was primarily about attention as an end in itself—a means of focussing outrage over Trump’s many diffuse scandals by contriving a unified crisis point on health care, a reliably good issue for Democrats. I think it broadly worked, forcing a longer-term debate on the subsidies, and contributing (at least as Trump saw it) to poor Republican returns in off-year elections. What has unfolded during the D.H.S shutdown has shown that harnessing attention, even when it shouldn’t be the primary goal, is an essential precondition of change—and that, in the Trump era, half measures lead most to look away. I found something that Mullin said in his confirmation hearing to be revealing, if, perhaps, accidentally so: that his six-month goal is for his agency not to be “the lead story every single day.” One way to achieve that is to change your behavior. Another is to rely on people being consumed by something else. ♦

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